“What do you mean?” I was on edge, and it showed in my voice. “You did trust him, didn’t you? With—us. Me and Brianna.”
“I hadn’t a choice about that, aye? Now I do.” He straightened, rubbing his palms together, and the last fragments of peanut skin whirled away in the strengthening wind.
I drew a deep breath to keep my voice from shaking, and brushed bits of shell off my bodice. “Now you do? You mean you’re wondering whether you can believe what he wrote in that book?”
“I am.”
“He was an historian,” I said firmly, refusing to turn my head and look behind me. “He wouldn’t—he couldn’t—falsify anything, any more than Roger could change what’s in the Bible. Or you tell me a deliberate lie.”
“And you of all people ken what history is,” he said bluntly, and stood up, knees cracking. “As for lying … everyone does that, Sassenach, if not often. I’ve certainly done it.”
“Not to me,” I said. It wasn’t a question and he didn’t answer it.
“Fetch a bowl, aye?”
He picked up the basin and moved out into the yard, where the wind caught at his shirt and belled the cloth out behind him. The clouds were boiling up behind the mountains, and the smell of rain was sharp on the wind. It wouldn’t be long.
I stood, feeling very strange, and turned. The front door was standing open, empty, its canvas covering pushed aside. I felt the wind whoosh past me, moving in my skirts, and heard it go down the hall and into the rooms before me, rattling the small glass jars in my surgery, flapping papers in Jamie’s study.
On my way to the kitchen, I glimpsed Frank’s book, lying on the table in Jamie’s study, and on impulse—glancing involuntarily over my shoulder, though I was quite alone—I stepped in.
The Soul of a Rebel: The Scottish Roots of the American Revolution. By Franklin W. Randall, PhD.
Jamie had left the book open, facedown. He never treated books like that. He would use anything for a bookmark—leaves, bird’s feathers, a hair ribbon … once I had opened a book he was reading to find the small dried body of a skink that someone had stepped on. But he always closed a book, careful of the binding.
Frank stared up at me from the back cover, calm and inscrutable. I touched his face, very gently, through the clear plastic cover, with a feeling of distant grief, regret mingled with—why not be honest now? There was no need to keep secrets from myself—relief. It was finished.
Oddly, the feeling of someone standing behind me had vanished when I came into the house.
I picked the book up to close it, and glanced inside as I did so. Chapter 16, said the title at the top of the page. Partisan Bands.
I fetched the big creamware bowl Jamie had brought me from Salem and took it outside, not glancing at the book—now properly closed on the desk—but well aware of it.
Jamie began the winnowing, taking a handful from the basin, pouring the mix of peanuts and debris from one hand to the next and back again, letting the bits of shell and skin fly away as the heavier peanuts dropped with a small ting-ting-ting! into the bowl. The wind was strong enough—it would be too strong in a bit, and start blowing away the nuts as well. I sat down on the ground by the bowl and began to pick out any last fragments of shell that had fallen with the cleaned nuts.
“You’ve read the book, then?” I asked after a moment, and he nodded, not looking at me. “What do you think of it?”
He made another Scottish noise, shook the last of the peanuts clinking into the bowl, and sat down on the grass beside me.
“I think the bastard wrote it for me, is what I think,” he said bluntly.
I was startled. “For you?”
“Aye. He’s talking to me.” He raised one shoulder, self-conscious. “Or at least I think he is. Between the lines. I mean … it might only be as I’m losin’ my mind. That’s maybe more likely. But …”
“Talking to you … as in, the, um, text seems personally relevant?” I asked carefully. “It couldn’t help but be, could it? Given where and when we are just now, I mean.”
He sighed and twitched his shoulders, as though his shirt was too tight—which it wasn’t; it was billowing over his shoulders like a sail in the wind. I hadn’t seen him do that in a long time, and a crawling anxiety tightened my chest.
“He’s—it’s—” He shook his head, looking for words. “He’s talking to me,” he repeated doggedly. “He kens who I am—who I am,” he said with emphasis and looked at me, his eyes dark blue. “He kens it’s the Scotsman that took his wife from him and he’s talkin’ directly to me. I can feel him, as if he stood behind me, whispering in my ear.” I flinched, violently, and he blinked, startled.
“That sounds … unpleasant,” I said. The tiny hairs prickled along my jaw.
The corner of his mouth turned up. He stopped what he was doing and took my hand, and I felt better.
“Well, it’s a mite unsettling, Sassenach. I dinna mind it, exactly—I mean, surely to God he has the right to say things to me if he likes. It’s only … why?”
“Well …” I said slowly. “Maybe … perhaps … for us?” I nodded toward the distant creek, where Jem and Germain and Mandy and Fanny were evidently catching leeches, with a good deal of shrieking. My lips felt dry, and I licked them briefly.
“I mean—we think, don’t we, that he found out? About you not dying, I mean. And maybe that he knew or guessed that Bree would come back looking for you. Maybe he … found me, too. In history, I mean.” Speaking the words made me feel quite hollow. The thought of Frank discovering something—God knew what—about me in the maelstrom of scattered documents. And making up his mind—while I was still right there with him, dammit!—not to tell me—and to find out more.
“He hasn’t—mentioned me, has he? In the book?” I forced the words out, just above the sound of the wind. A cold drop struck my cheek, and four large dark spots appeared instantly on my apron.
“No,” Jamie said, and rose to his feet, reaching down a hand to me. “Come inside, a nighean, it’s starting to rain.”
We barely made it into the house with the basin, the bowl, and our peanut crop—followed in short order by Germain, Jemmy, Fanny, Mandy, Aidan McCallum, and Aodh MacLennan, splattered with rain and with arms full of wet vegetables from the garden.
What with one thing and another—grinding the peanuts, putting the risen bread to bake, washing dirt from the young turnips, saving the greens in a bowl of cold water to keep them from wilting, handing fresh small knobby carrots out to the children, who ate them like candy, then slicing the fresh bread and assembling sandwiches, while roasting sweet potatoes in the ashes and making a warm bacon dressing for the cooked greens—there was no further conversation between me and Jamie about Frank’s book. And if anyone stood behind me, he was considerate enough to give me elbow room.
IT WENT ON raining through supper, and after ascertaining that the McCallums and the MacLennans wouldn’t be worrying where their boys were, Jamie brought down the mattresses and all of the children bedded down together in a damp, warm heap before the hearth.